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International Journal of Law and Management
DETERMINANTS OF JOB HOPPING BEHAVIOR: THE CASE OF
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SECTOR
Journal:
International Journal of Law and Management
Manuscript ID
IJLMA-06-2020-0178
Manuscript Type:
Research Paper
Keywords:
Job Hopping Behavior, Validation of Job Hopping, Information
Technology, Normative Commitment, Job Satisfaction
International Journal of Law and Management
International Journal of Law and Management
Article
DETERMINANTS OF JOB HOPPING BEHAVIOR:
THE CASE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
SECTOR
Abstract: Information Technology industry in Vietnam places itself in a high developing
potential when the market is usually open with variety of job opportunities. However, that leads
to a negative reality due to the increase of the Job Hopping phenomena within the industry.
This study is aimed to investigate how IT employees build up their actual behavior of job
hopping coming from the aspect of emotional experience throughout their work and how they
support the motives of leaving in two different facet: Career advancement and Workplace
escape. The number of 214 valid responses were collected by online survey only from IT
employees in mostly Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam. The findings reveal the significant affect
from Workplace escape motive that leads to the Behavior of Job Hop, but not from the Career
Enhancement. The result also revealed the effect of indebted obligation when most of the
employees maintain the low level of normative commitment and the proper increase in
emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction can help to improve the Normative Commitment of
such employees. This study make its contribution and recommendations to human resource
management in Information Technology industry.
Keywords: Job Hopping Behavior, Validation of Job Hopping, Normative Commitment, Job
Satisfaction, Emotional Exhaustion, Information Technology.
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1. Introduction
With the potential of massively growing parallel with the continuous development of
Technology when being able to approach more and more aspects not just in business but also in
every services and industries, Information Technology is now one of the hottest occupation market
when providing both sustainable environment for current position and extend itself with whole lot
more new field, especially in Vietnam. As a developing country so far, Vietnam is just in the
position of starter in many of the familiar specialty in various developed countries, including
Machine Learning in SMEs (small and medium size enterprises) and production industries;
Artificial Intelligence in Multinational and Big size companies (Giang, 2019). For that reason,
working opportunities in Information Technology field has never been a problem and continuously
extend itself for more fields and position. According to TopDev annual report at the beginning of
2020, they predicted the lack of employees can be reached up to 100,000 positions, hence,
providing more chances for employees to build up their intention of leaving their job whenever
they feel like resulting in high rate of Job Hopping in the previous year with only 1.5 year averagely
(TopDev, 2020). Recently, high demand industry as Information Technology is putting more focus
on individual demands of each employee as a result of the variety of concerns about the influencers
of commitment raised from the beginning of the 21st century, therefore, Job Hopping phenomena
is getting more extend among the field (Gqubule, 2006) (Ramakrishna & Potosky, 2002). Also,
beside knowledge intensive industries, Information Technology is usually be considered as high
chance of growing the Job Hopping intention (Kawabe, 1991) However, not as common as
Turnover intention, Job Hopping Behavior has not been deeply studied with specific scale until
Validation of Job Hopping Behavior was proposed (Lake, Highhouse, & Shrift, 2017).
The paper carried out the purpose of investigating how emotional experience factors affect
the Obligation related commitment .The emotional experience factors consist of positive factor –
job satisfaction and negative factor – emotional exhaustion from the study of Wong & Tay, 2010,
both facets have been studied with affective commitment but yet lack of study about normative
commitment. Affective and Normative commitments are both components of Organizational
commitment while Affective commitment refers to the intention of keeping the position because
of the desire but not by any other attachment whereas Normative commitment is defined as staying
for the reasons related to obligation. Also, by applying Withdrawal construct of Validation of Job
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Hopping Behavior, a connection was constructed between normative commitment and the two
separated motives of Job Hopping Behavior, Advance motive and Escape motive (Lake,
Highhouse, & Shrift, 2017). The result gathered could be used for second objective to make
recommendations for human resource management in IT field with further information of what
actually influences commitment and what type of motive may reflect more on the intention of
periodically switch jobs.
To achieve such objectives, quantitative research is implicated using the primary data collected
from online and offline surveys from employees that are currently working in many Information
Technology related companies in Ho Chi Minh city. As for analyzing tactic and method, SmartPLS
software is applied to ensure the reliability and validity of the factors as well as confirming the
significant and developing the hypothesizes from the propsosed construct.
2. Literature review
a. Job Hopping Behavior:
Job Hopping Behavior was first recognized with the term “Hobo Syndrome”, to point out the
characteristic of a group of employees and workers to periodically switch position from one
company to another, usually with the reasons of internal impulse and irrational thought (Ghiselli,
1974) and later on, the alternatives and offers hold themselves a less important role in making
leaving decision by hobos when Khatri et al (2001), redefined the Hobo Syndrome as Job Hopping
Behavior as well as explaining the lack of apply proper process from evaluating to finding
alternatives and finalized by switching job. Normative belief and cultural influence also make a
significant impact on Job Hopping Behavior (Iverson, 1997).
As the root of causes that lead to Job Hopping Behavior have not been studied much, Judge
and Watanabe (1995) made their research and confirmed the use of historical analysis to make
prediction of Job Hopping Behavior among employees. Later on, Individual characteristic tactic
was suggested with higher possibility of implication and without the need of many requirements
(Woo, 2011) and also the ability to differentiate the quitting motive among workers to identify
what kind of “hobo” that such employee wants to become in the attitudinal and behavioral aspect.
Due to the fact that more than 50% of current well-educated IT employees is in the later-born of
Millennials generation (at the age between 22 and 28) whereas their working experience is reported
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to be in the range of 1 to 3 years in a specific IT field, with lack of time of job-hopping comparing
to the average time of job switch, 20 months, the situation is more appropriate to use individual
characteristic tactic as analyzing method for this field.
b. Motives of Job Hopping Behavior:
By adapting the 8 motivational forces proposed by Maertz & Griffeth (2004), and synthesizing
from two interrelated academic disciplines, there are two general perspectives on job-hopping
represent for the two most common characteristic when mentioning about leaving the current
position that can be used as validating scale of Job Hopping Behavior: Career Advancement
motive and Working environment Escaping motive (Lake, Highhouse, & Shrift, 2017).
i. Advance motive of Job Hopping Behavior:
Emerging with the idea of career perspective, the Job Hopping decision coming from
reasons related to the decision of looking for advancement from work is shortened as Advance
motive. Career enhancement is an encouragement to motivate people to change job by career
scholars (Hall, 1976). Further researches has proven that Job-hopping is considered to contribute
to an individual’s career development for the succeed frequency of associating with financial gains
and career advancement (Huang & Zhang, 2013). The fact is also highly supported in Vietnam
context of IT industry when the market is considered to promote the individual salary by 15-20%
for each job switch instead of 10% annually when keeping the current position (TopDev, 2020).
Growth opportunities and career advancement can be found whether inside or outside the
management of current company, therefore, developmental assignees (career development
oriented employees) tend to make their turnover intention based on the self-measurement of
current chances and other offers (Stahl, Chua, Caligiuri, Cerdin, & Taniguchi, 2009). “Retention
upon repatriation may not necessarily be determined by repatriates’ frustration, but rather by a
rational choice to move elsewhere in search of a better career fit” (p. 9) (Lazarova, 2007)
From all those supportive ideas, this perspective is described as a reflection of job-
hopping qualities in the aspect of personal drive, initiative, and ambition whereas the
encouragement of moving jobs coming from the comparison between current company and
external career opportunities from other places (Lake, Highhouse, & Shrift, 2017). In other words,
this factor describes how the employees want to quit their job for other opportunities.
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H1: Advance Motive of Job Hopping Behavior is positively related to Job Hopping
Behavior
ii. Escape motive of Job Hopping Behavior:
The second job-hopping motive is taken from the organizational turnover perspective when
employees tried to escape their own jobs. Job-hopping is usually influenced by sudden and directly
coming the personal issues with the current organization, which lead to actual withdrawal intention
(Woo, 2011). Environment escaping motive was first mentioned in several researches about the
raising ignorance of the traditional regular quitting process behavior among employees when they
employees come to the decision of leaving job without evaluation and looking for alternatives.
Adapting from turnover intention perspective, many authors recommend further research on
employees negative characteristics involving job-hopping behavior such as anxiety (Jennings,
1970), impulsivity (Mobley, 1977), a lack of moral force (Maertz & Griffeth, 2004), or lack of
fortitude or persistence (Ghiselli, 1974) (Kramer, 1974).
From all above ideas and theory, motive related to change job coming from the dislike
of work environments is entitled escape motive (Lake, Highhouse, & Shrift, 2017). Describing in
other terms, Escape motive reveals how much the workers base on their current problems within
the working environment to finalize their reasons of leaving the job.
H2: Escape Motive of Job Hopping Behavior is positively related to Job Hopping Behavior
c. Normative Commitment:
Organizational commitment is defined as an attachment behavior of individuals toward
their current organization (Mathieu & Zajac, 1990). It is convinced and supported among many
researches that componential model of commitment with three different definitions and are proven
to be related to each other, referred as affective commitment, continuance commitment and
normative commitment (Allen & Meyer, 1990). For this research, Normative commitment is
applied as mediator when having positive relationship with Organizational Commitment as well
as sharing common antecedents with Affective Commitment.
Normative commitment is proposed to be one over three components of organizational
commitment which can be measured base on employee’s personal experiences toward
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familial/cultural socialization and following organizational socialization entry into the
organization (Wiener, 1982). In the case of organizational socialization, it is proposed that making
organizational practices to let their staffs feel the essential to hold a certain degree of loyalty would
be more likely to have strong normative commitment. In other explanation, normative commitment
is considered to be “obligation to stay” (Allen N. &., 1996). Despite being underutilized
component when measuring the relationship between organizational commitment and any other
factors, including Turnover intention and Job Hopping Behavior, the Normative Commitment
itself was tested to go beyond the result of Affective Commitment in applying to two aspects:
moral duty and indebted obligation (Meyer & Parfyonova, 2010).
As for the relationship between Job Hopping Behavior motives and Normative
commitment, Escape motive and Advance motive of Job Hopping Behavior have been proven to
be negatively influenced by Normative Commitment instead of Organizational Commitment or
Affective Commitment and also to highlight the Withdrawal Construct when scaling the two
different motives that mentioned above (Lake, Highhouse, & Shrift, 2017). Therefore, Normative
Commitment can be considered as the connect factor between the emotional experience
influencers and Job Hopping Behavior as well as the two common motives of Job Hopping
Behavior.
H3: Normative Commitment is negatively related to Job Hopping Behavior.
H4: Normative Commitment is negatively related to Advance motive of Job Hopping Behavior.
H5: Normative Commitment is negatively related to Escape motive of Job Hopping Behavior.
d. Job satisfaction:
Job satisfaction is defined as an indicator to measure the positive or negative emotion or
attitude towards employees’ current job in general (Locke, 1978). Job satisfaction is influenced by
individual’s self-evaluation of their current position and surrounding working environment to
compare with their values, expectation and needs (Sempane, Rieger, & Roodt, 2002) and known
as an indicator of happiness in the aspect of occupation (Rothmann & Coetzer, 2002). It is studied
in many different concepts on how they affect to other dependent indicators within Human
Resources field including employee turnover (Grissom, Nicholson-Crotty, & Keiser, 2012),
organizational commitment (Hartmann, Rutherford, Feinberg, & Anderson, 2014), and degree of
absenteeism (Mueller & Price, 1990).
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Generally, Job satisfaction has been proven to be a precursor of organizational commitment
since they can bolstered when high level of job satisfaction can positively improve the way
employees put their current workplace in one of the necessary source of satisfaction (Mowday,
Porter, & Steers, 1982). Higher level of job satisfaction negatively measures and predicts
withdrawal cognitions, for example, thoughts of quitting, alternative searching intentions, quitting
decisions. Continuous low job satisfaction within employees can lead to the likelihood and
retention of Job hopping behavior (Huang, 2013).
H6: Job satisfaction is positively related to Normative Commitment.
e. Emotional Exhaustion:
Emotional Exhaustion was first studied as one of three components of burnout experience
including emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and decreased professional self-efficacy (Maslach &
Jackson, 1981). Apart from the stress from working with customers and low evaluation of
compliment, Emotional Exhaustion is the key components and defined in the case where
employees no longer contain enough positive emotion to their job lead to the low level of desirable
psychological level. Later on, Emotional Exhaustion was modified to study in the Information
Technology as Work Exhaustion that using various of antecedents in scaling the level of Emotional
Exhaustion (Moore, 2000).
The relationship between Burnout component, Emotional Exhaustion in this situation,
and Organizational commitment (including both affective and normative commitment) has been
strongly supported (Jackson, Turner, & Brief, 1987 ). Role Conflict and Work Overload are usually
the high related antecedent between Emotional Exhaustion and Employee’s commitment to current
organization (Lee & Ashforth, 1996).
H7: Emotional Exhaustion is negatively related to Normative Commitment.
Adapting from the research model in Job Hopping Behavior of Wong & Tay (2010) with the
Validation Scale provided by Lake, Highhouse & Shrift (2017), the construct mode is proposed
with the use of testing the influencers and mediator to the Job Hopping Behavior.
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Figure 1. Proposed research model
3. Methodology
a. Sample and Data collection:
214 valid primary respondents were collected with the target respondent for the survey are the
working employees in Information Technology field in Technology companies, mostly in Ho Chi
Minh city with any age above 22 and has been working for at least 1 IT company in the past within
the following field.
b. Measurement:
This research applied quantitative method in analyzing data, hence online survey would take part
in collecting essential quantity of data. The survey is divided into 3 main parts including pilot test
question with “Yes/No” answer to identify real IT employees, the main content part as the
statement about such factors mentioned with five-point Likert scale and the demographic part
consists of 5 questions about participants’ information.
-Job satisfaction: five item measurement was taken from Hochwarter et al. (2002)
to evaluate how good/bad employees feel about their current job
-Emotional Exhaustions: Negative emotion will be measured using the general scale
of (Moore, 2000), his work towards Emotional Exhaustion was also specifically used in IT industry
in his later research within 2000.
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-Normative Commitment: Six out of Eight items were used in this survey, due to
prove that the other two was not strongly supported to organizational commitment, the scale
evaluate the current commitment and loyal feeling to the work.
-Advance motive & Escape motive of Job Hopping Behavior: Both scales were
taken from the withdrawal construct of Validation of Job Hopping Behavior (Lake, Highhouse, &
Shrift, 2017).
-Job Hopping Behavior: questionnaire survey was adopted from Khatri et. al. (1999)
to measure their attitude about Job Hopping Behavior and Switching Jobs.
4. Data analysis
a. Demographic statistics
From the 243 responses, 214 respondents are counted as valid when meeting the required
conditions:
- Has been studying and working in the Information Technology field.
- Finished all answers in the survey.
The total valid responses accounted for 88% of total collected ones for they data analysis.
As for demographic and categorized information, male participants took the majority with 73.4%
of the total compare to the female ones (26.6%). Also, this research can reveal themselves as more
focus on young generations of employees when 89.3% of the respondents are in the working age
of below 27 years old and total 79.5% of all with under 2 years of experience.
Table 1. Demographic information summary
Information
Scale
Percentage
1 = Male
157
73.4%
Gender
2 = Female
57
26.6%
1 = 22-27 years old
191
89.3%
2 = 27-35 years old
19
8.9%
Age
3 = Above 35 years old
4
1.9%
Current
occupation
1 = Undergraduate
student
121
56.5%
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2 = Graduated and
working
93
43.5%
1 = HCM UT
19
8.9%
2 = UIT
35
16.4%
3 = IU
72
33.6%
4 = PTIT
9
4.2%
5 = FPT
7
3.3%
University
studying
(studied)
6 = other
72
33.6%
1 = Under 1 year
120
56.1%
2 = 1-2 years
50
23.4%
3 = 2-4 years
17
7.9%
Experience
4 = over 4 years
27
12.6%
b. Reliability test
i. Indicator Reliability
In the proposed model, all factors mentioned are considered as reflective indicators but not
formative ones since each item is co-related to other items within the factor when analyzing.
Therefore, all Outer Loadings of each must remain above 0.7 as well as above 0.5 in indicator
reliability (Hair, Hult, C.M.Ringle, & M.Sarstedt, 2014).
Following the standard of reliability, the items would be eliminated from the model are JS4 (from
Job Satisfaction), EE2 (from Emotional Exhaustion), NC1 and NC5 (from Normative
Commitment), AM1 (from Advance Motive) and EM1 (from Escape Motive) due to the
unsatisfied Outer Loading value that cannot exceed 0.7.
Table 2. Outer Loadings and Indicator reliability
Latent
variable
Manifest
variable
Outer
Loading
Indicator
reliability
JS1
0.8824
0.779
JS
JS2
0.864
0.746
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JS3
0.8748
0.765
JS5
0.8221
0.676
EE1
0.8226
0.677
EE3
0.8953
0.802
EE4
0.8276
0.685
EE
EE5
0.9033
0.816
NC2
0.8541
0.729
NC3
0.8113
0.658
NC4
0.8379
0.702
NC
NC6
0.7738
0.599
AM2
0.817
0.667
AM3
0.8672
0.752
AM
AM4
0.8051
0.648
EM2
0.8014
0.642
EM3
0.8404
0.706
EM
EM4
0.7614
0.580
JHB1
0.8496
0.722
JHB2
0.8662
0.750
JHB
JHB3
0.7233
0.523
ii. Internal Consistency Reliability:
Beside the traditional criterion in ensuring the reliability of the multi-point scaled item, the
Cronbach’s Alpha, the data analyzed by SmartPLS is suggested to use the alternative option –
Composite Reliability, when the method prioritized the items to measure the following factors and
over-valued the consistency between items toward other ones within the factor (Hair, Hult,
C.M.Ringle, & M.Sarstedt, 2014). The data considered as reliable using the Composite Reliability
scale is similar to the Cronbach’s Alpha when it has to be between 0.6 and 0.9 where above the
value of 0.7 is considered as desirable.
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Table 3. Composite Reliability and Cronbach’s Alpha
Cronbach's Alpha
Composite Reliability
Job Satisfaction
0.8879
0.9198
Emotional Exhaustion
0.8856
0.921
Normative Commitment
0.8372
0.8912
Advance Motive
0.7739
0.8692
Escape Motive
0.7236
0.8435
Job Hopping Behavior
0.7466
0.8555
iii. Convergent Validity:
The purpose of the Convergent Validity is to check how strong that relationship between items
correlate to each other inside the measured factor. The measurement used to identify the value of
Convergent Validity is Average Variance Extracted (AVE), with the scale proposed by Bagozz
(1988) that the minimum value required is 0.5 that all AVE value of each factor should be above
the threshold value. In this research, all factors remain themselves higher value.
Table 4. Average Variance Extracted (AVE)
Average Variance
Extracted (AVE)
Job Satisfaction
0.7415
Emotional Exhaustion
0.7448
Normative Commitment
0.6721
Advance Motive
0.6892
Escape Motive
0.6427
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Job Hopping Behavior
0.6651
iv. Discriminant Validity:
Discriminant Validity can be measured in many methods when the value shows the inter-relation
from each factor (or each item) to each of the other factors within the proposed model (Fornell &
Larcker, 1981), the methods can be used are Fornell-Larcker criterion, Cross Loading and HTMT
table where the most common one is using Fornell-Larcker criterion. It is applied to identify the
inappropriate value when any AVE value of the factor is observed to be lower than the correlation
value of that factor to the other ones (Hair, Hult, C.M.Ringle, & M.Sarstedt, 2014). From the result,
it is confirmed that all indicators is acceptable when all AVE values are higher than any
correlations.
Table 5. Fornell – Larcker Criterion Analysis
AM
EE
EM
JHB
JS
NC
AM
0.8302
EE
0.2212
0.863
EM
0.5546
0.3358
0.8017
JHB
0.3613
0.379
0.5662
0.8155
JS
0.0318
-0.1525
0.059
0.0846
0.8611
NC
0.2106
0.4472
0.4484
0.4674
0.192
0.8198
c. Hypotheses testing:
The bootstrapping test has been done after the confirmatory of Reliability checking with the re-
assessment of 5000 subsamples, proposed by Hair (2017), to ensure that the result coming up is
ideal. The PLS-SEM would be set as running two-tailed test with 5% of significant, equal to the
value of 1.96 in t-test. The test would confirm and support any hypothesis that remain the upper
value than 1.96 in T statistics and also below 0.05 in P values. The result from table 6 demonstrated
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the inter-correlation of the factors to each other based on the proposed hypothesizes as well as the
significant of such relations.
Table 6. Bootstrapping result
Relationship
Path coefficient
T Statistics
P Values
Results
H1: Advance Motive
-> Job Hopping
Behavior
0.0833
1.1785
0.2386
Rejected
H2: Escape Motive -
> Job Hopping
Behavior
0.3984
5.0989
0.0000
Supported
H3: Normative
Commitment -> Job
Hopping Behavior
0.2712
3.936
0.0001
Supported
H4: Normative
Commitment ->
Advance Motive
0.2106
2.4175
0.0157
Supported
H5: Normative
Commitment ->
Escape Motive
0.4484
6.8346
0.0000
Supported
H6: Job Satisfaction
-> Normative
Commitment
0.2665
2.8339
0.0046
Supported
H7: Emotional
Exhaustion ->
Normative
Commitment
0.4879
7.1995
0.0000
Supported
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The result of Hypothesis 1 and 2 illustrate the significant path of which motive affect more
significantly where Escape motive is proven to have strong and positive relation toward Job
Hopping Behavior with β = 0.3984 in path coefficient as well as remaining below 0.0001 in P
value indicates the hypothesis is strongly supported. As for the Advance motive, this hypothesis
is rejected due to the low path relation toward Job Hopping Behavior (β = 0.0833) and higher P
value comparing to the required one to be confirmed as supported idea. Therefore, Job Hopping
Behavior tends to be coming only from the reasons of working environment and employees’
relation themselves while career enhancement motive is not the inevitable factor to encourage the
actual intention of job hopping.
The Normative commitment is also accepted to be contributor to Job Hopping Behavior with path
coefficient β = 0.271 and confirmed to have strong relationship when maintaining less than 0.001
in P value. From the result, Hypothesis 3 is also supported and accepted.
For the hypothesis about how normative commitment influences both different validating motive
of Job Hopping Behavior, both views (H4 and H5) demonstrated the positive relation from
normative commitment to advance motive and escape motive with Path coefficient value as 0.2712
and 0.2106 respectively. The result given out was totally opposite from the proposed hypothesizes
4 and 5 when confirming to have positive relations to both Job hopping motives instead of negative
impact. However, normative commitment can still be used as predictor for advance motive and
escape motive when maintaining the strong significant index, especially for escape motive.
Hence, the result shows that normative commitment can be used to predict both motives of Job
Hopping Behavior with stronger relation and significant coming from the concept of Escape
motive, but yet the result revealed the opposite perspective of what has been proposed above when
commitment should promote the negative impact to the validations of Job Hopping Behavior
instead of positive relationship as reported.
Last but not least, the proposed emotional experience influencer as job satisfaction and emotional
exhaustion (H6 and H7) are explained to both have positive and strong relationship toward
normative commitment with the confirmatory of bootstrapping result. Despite being the strongest
hypothesis of all in the model, with path coefficient as β = 0.4879, Emotional exhaustion shows
itself as a positive influencer of normative commitment instead of the negative one as supported
in mentioned study.
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The data also provides further information of how the dependent factor and mediators are predicted
in the result of R square (coefficient of determination). 38.24% of the final dependent factor (Job
Hopping Behavior) can be predicted by advance motive, escape motive and also normative
commitment. Normative commitment can explain 20.1% of escape motive but only 4.4% of the
advance motive. Job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion together can be used to explain 26.9%
of normative commitment.
5. Discussion and Implication
The purpose of this study is to apply the Validation scale of Job Hopping Behavior provided by
Lake, Highhouse & Shrift (2017) as well as to test if the normative commitment is actually affect
to the motives and also affected by emotional experience factors as job satisfaction and emotional
exhaustion.
The result indicates the fact that even though IT employees in Vietnam is usually attracted by
external opportunities and open for them, internal working environment escaping is actually the
main factor that leads to Job Hopping Behavior among them. The view is supporting the research
of Mobley, 1997 in the concept of internal impulsive and the original study of Ghiselli in 1974
when the hobos, the job hopping employees, tend to be lack of persistence. Moreover, the statistical
result can be illustrated by TopDev annual report in the beginning of 2020 of IT industry where
despite the fact that over 70% of total 75,000 surveyed IT employees agree to the idea of accepting
more profitable and attractive deal, more than 85.7% of them are actually satisfied with the current
position and have no intention to transfer to another ones.
Also, the opposite results comparing to what has been proposed in emotional exhaustion and job
hopping behavior are explained for many reasons, specifically by the low level of normative
commitment as over 89% of total respondents are in the working age of below 27 years old, hence
lack of working experience and commitment. As for Job Hopping Behavior, the situation is
demonstrated with the long appearing phenomena in Vietnam, “office zombie”, where low
commitment employees still maintain the idea of keeping up their current and stable job instead of
thinking of leaving the job for no specific reason since no emotional exhaustion is suffered. About
the contrary result collected about the positive relationship between emotional exhaustion and
normative commitment, the case is similar to research of Tan & Akhtar (1998) about China
employees in terms of “Indebted obligation” facet, which defined as the more effort they contribute
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to the work the more they feel like the position has to be owned by them but not anyone else and
prevent the face lost situation, later promoting the normative commitment, however, more effort
also means great emotional exhaustion they have to go through.
Furthermore, the findings confirmed that Job satisfaction also contributes in the improvement of
organizational commitment among the IT employees in the aspect of obligation and responsible.
As the findings focus on the influencers of normative commitment among young and
inexperienced but potential employees of IT industry, it is useful for Human Resource department
of such companies to take advantage of it to prevent the turnover decisions. The employers should
promote not just benefit to improve job satisfaction among employees, but also more tasks and
works should be focused and released so that workers and employees can feel the empowerment
and belongings to the company in general and the position in specific. Moreover, the employees
in the field reveal themselves as following “indebted obligation”, the employers should make them
feel that they owe the company and control the level of exhaustion and empowerment coming from
the work when they should consider themselves as high contributor and maintain great
commitment toward the company.
Moreover, the research highlighted the direct antecedent of job hopping behavior is because of
peers relation, job interest and working environment rather than external chance of career
developing. For this research situation, the Benefit & Compensation section, especially in the facet
of internal working condition to prevent peers conflict as well as boredom that probably turning
into turnover decision when internal relationship between peers plays a significant role in keeping
employee around instead of just focusing on providing promotion opportunities.
It is potential to promote study from other age groups combined with more geographical and
industry demographic. Also, it is recommended to develop model with different construct scale
where the only scale is used in this paper is Withdrawal construct. Finally, the dual characteristic
of organizational commitment components has not been deeply studied when only the “indebted
obligation” is discovered with the combined characteristic of normative commitment and
continuous commitment, the potential is still on the line when lack of other dual characteristic is
found, for example, the combination of affective and normative commitment – moral imperative.
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